Farming on water: Stackable, sustainable, in the city

John Edel stands next to a raft system for plants in the growing room of his aquaponic farm in an old meat-packing plant in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago. (Alex Garcia/ Chicago Tribune)

John Edel is turning a former meatpacking plant on the edge of Chicago's old Union Stockyards into an indoor farm.

In the basement, microorganisms are eating tilapia waste, converting it into fertilizer for the lettuce, kale and wheatgrass growing in a shallow pool of water nearby.

This process is called aquaponic farming. It minimizes water use while allowing year-round harvests, and it's just the beginning of Edel's vision for a futuristic, urban farm he has called "The Plant."

"The idea is that nothing leaves the facility but food — period," said Edel, 41. Half of The Plant will be rented to startup food companies, including a commercial brewery.

The heart of America's urban agriculture movement is Milwaukee, where Will Allen, a sharecropper's son and former professional basketball player, has turned a dilapidated plant nursery into a cutting-edge urban farm, raising plants and vegetables, plus the thousands of tilapia needed to fertilize them.

Allen's disciples are converting far less logical sites into aquaponic farms. In Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood, for example, his daughter, Erika Allen, is building the Iron Street Farm in a former truck depot.

Edel will be among the first to expand this concept across multiple floors of a single building: A shuttered 93,500-square-foot former pork-packing plant.

We're running out land to feed the world's exploding population. (New York City's approximately 8 million inhabitants, for instance, eat an amount of food that requires a land mass the size of Virginia to grow, according to Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University professor and prominent vertical farms advocate.)

Farms of the future must occupy less space, rely on fewer pesticides and produce food that travels blocks, not miles to our tables, given the skyrocketing cost of fuel. Such requirements have spawned concepts of farms being housed in glass skyscrapers from Chicago to Dubai.

"We're not proponents of these fantasy skyscrapers," said Erika Allen, who is beginning to construct greenhouses and install fish tanks at Iron Street Farm. "The whole goal is to create a farm that's sustainable and makes money. And you can't make money if your infrastructure costs are too high."

What's profitable and achievable, Allen says, are tiered aquaponic systems, or minivertical farms in which fish and plants coexist off each other. Their ecosystems are linked via tubes.

Waste to energy

Edel's building at 1400 West 46th Street is a place children would dare each other to sneak into; the escapade ending when a pipe suddenly clanked and everyone bolted. Keeping scrappers away, however, is a different matter. Edel recently installed a security alarm that blares as loud as a tornado siren to keep them from trying to break in to steal metal.

Inside, broken concrete floors crackle as I walk. Dozens of windows have been filled with bricks. It is dark and cold.

But within a few years, Edel says a complex food-production system will be in place, the key to which is a $1 million, yet-to-be-bought anaerobic digester. Everything, and I mean everything, will be fed into it, from rotting tomatoes and meat, to brown and yellow grease.

On my last visit, it smelled like yeast outside.

"It gives us cover if we want to make foul smells of our own from time to time," Edel said.

The digester will convert the waste into gas, which will power a generator, which will power the facility. ComEd will not have to supply electricity.

"That's what takes us to the next level" of sustainability, Edel said. Most of "the power for the anaerobic digester will come from neighboring businesses' waste. … We're looking at 18 tons a day of biomass to power this place."

Edel anticipates receiving 2.1 million gallons a year of "beefy, sludge bioproduct" from a local food-flavoring maker. But the brewery, bakeries and the mom-and-pop tenants who will rent commercial kitchen space from Edel also will send their waste to the digester.

"Oddly enough, one of the great realizations we're having is we aren't going to be heating much at all," Edel said. "We're going to be cooling almost all the year in this building because all of the activities are heat-producing, especially these growing systems."

The building, formerly occupied by Peer Foods, was shuttered four years ago when the meat packer shipped 400 skilled jobs to Columbus, Ind., save a security guard. Edel, a lifelong Chicagoan and general contractor, bought the building last year for $525,000, the estimated value of the metal inside it. He reasoned that its floor drains, vapor-tight light fixtures, stainless steel evaporators and a chemistry lab would be ideal for food businesses.

Edel estimates that apart from the digester, the build-out will cost only $750,000. That's because Edel barters for things he needs and also counts on help.